Kamala Harris Wants to Turn the Page

In her recent appearance on The View, Kamala Harris was asked if there is anything she would have done differently than President Biden. Harris responded: “There is not a thing that comes to mind … and I’ve been a part of … the decisions that have had impact.” Harris’s fidelity to the Biden agenda is not surprising. She has boasted in the past about being the last person in the room with Biden when he made the disastrous decision to abandon Afghanistan, give up the vital American air base at Bagram, and open the door to a rapid government takeover by the Taliban. Harris also is on record as enthusiastically embracing Bidenomics, with its recklessly high spending and record-high inflation.

It is mildly perplexing that Harris would not change a thing from the Biden legacy given that five short years ago she opposed fracking, endorsed an open border, wanted to eliminate the phrase “illegal aliens” from the nomenclature, advocated starting “from scratch” to replace the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), and supported Medicare for all.

What seems more curious than her admission that she would not change any of Biden’s policies, despite their unpopular outcomes, is Harris’s attempt to transform the election into a referendum on the president who Biden defeated four years earlier. In the Harris camp (which includes a large share of the media), the Trump administration, not the Biden/Harris regime, is the root cause of all of today’s problems. It’s as though Harris is starring in a sequel to the movie Back to the Future. Time travel makes it possible to turn back the clock to the Trump era and erase the history of the recent past. In the Harris screenplay, the role of Biff, the bully, is assigned to Donald Trump, who becomes the scapegoat for all problems, past and present.

Harris’s running mate Tim Walz appeared to embrace the Back to the Future theme when he told a Bethlehem, Pennsylvania audience: “We can’t afford four more years of this!” Was this a Freudian slip? In a literal sense, Walz is correct. We really can’t afford four more years of the disastrous inflation sparked by Bidenomics, which has become synonymous with overspending. More likely, Walz did not mean for us to take him so literally. Like Harris, he really wants to lay the blame for the problems of the recent past on the prior four years of the Trump administration. This is a feat that defies both logic and common sense. 

The notion that an incumbent administration can blame all of the nation’s problems on the candidate four years removed from power is opportunistic, but not realistic. Nonetheless, the Back to the Future theme appears to have gained some traction in that recent polls suggest a large share of voters see Harris as the candidate of change. In an October New York Times/Siena poll, Harris took a lead of 46 percent to 44 percent among respondents who saw the vice president, not Trump, as the candidate most likely to provide a departure from the status quo. Even Houdini may have found it difficult to escape this paradox!

While Harris’s comments on The View suggest complete agreement with Biden’s policies and programs, her rhetoric on the campaign trail has been all about change. On Day One, lots of stuff is going to happen! She has exclaimed at nearly every campaign stop that “We need to turn the page!” We definitely need to turn the page, but just whose policies are we turning the page on? The compliant media refuse to acknowledge that Harris can’t really turn the page on inflation or illegal immigration, or the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, much as she has tried to attach blame for all of the Biden/Harris era woes to their predecessor. In an interview with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, Harris said: “We have a secure border in that that is a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration. But there are still a lot of problems we are trying to fix given the deterioration that happened over the past four years, before we came in.” 

Are we turning the page on the open border that Kamala Harris endorsed in 2019? ICE recently released data indicating that the sheer volume of border crossings (which quadrupled under Biden/Harris) has resulted in superficial screening and enforcement of immigration policy. ICE indicates that a large number of illegal immigrants, who have been charged with or convicted of serious crimes in their home countries, are now in the United States. In one such case that received much attention, Victor Martinez Hernandez of El Salvador was charged with the rape and murder of Marylander Rachel Morin. Martinez Hernandez entered the United States illegally in February 2023 after murdering a young woman in El Salvador a month earlier.

We do need to turn the page, but not for the reasons Harris presumes. We need to turn the page, for example, on the Biden/Harris administration’s excessive spending, including nearly $1 trillion in the erroneously named “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022. Under this act, billions were allocated to provide subsidies for electric vehicles, including federal tax credits of up to $7,500 per car for wealthy folks to purchase their new Teslas! Billions of additional dollars were allocated for climate programs, including $22 billion for “Environmental Justice,” broadly defined. The bill also included $80 billion to hire more IRS agents to audit American taxpayers and small businesses, and included provisions to make sure restaurant workers pay taxes on their tips—clearly contradicting Harris’s promise not to tax tips. And of course, Harris would like us to turn the page on the fact that as vice president she boasted about casting the tie-breaking vote for this legislative boondoggle, which helped fuel out-of-control inflation. 

The Nixon mantra in 1972 was “Four More Years!” George H.W. Bush’s theme in 1992 was “Stay the Course!’ Those were honest, forthright rallying calls. You either liked the record of the incumbent president and his administration’s policies, or you didn’t. Harris has admitted that she would not have changed any of Biden’s major policies, so how did we reach the point where the second-in-command of a troubled administration can sound the theme “We Need to Turn the Page”?

We should not assume that Harris’s concept of “turning the page” means closing the border, or reducing massive federal spending on green energy boondoggles, or permitting fracking in Pennsylvania. The Biden/Harris legacy has largely been written and it will be difficult to delete or edit the fine print of what has occurred since January 20, 2021. We cannot simply turn the page.